Two questions regarding Defense and SKILL activations

I'm hoping some of the more experienced players can answer these two questions for me.
Thanks in advance!

1) Regarding Defense, what are the penalties as your DEF stat gets lowered from being attacked? My paradigm was that if your DEF stat is slightly lower than your DEF Crew cost, you would get a minor cut in your DEF Crew's Defense.

I understand that in this situation, if my current defense was below 16, all my Kiennas would become ineffective with 0 Defense, but I also know that if it's between 16 and some magic number, X, they would experience a minor cut in their Defense.

What is that magic number? I heard from Gears that it's 30, but I feel as if this is really low... the "OMG ZERG RUSH" tactic doesn't work >.>;

i was mistaken. i thought below 30 you decreased def by 10%, but after reading the in-game help file again, it's -30% def when below 10 def. otherwise you def won't be affected.

As for your example, your mermaids will always be effective UNLESS you restat and take away from your max def, then they will start to have stats of zero. if you always have the max def of 80, they will always work, just getting weaker as described above.

As for the skill activation rate, it doesn't seem controlled by combo levels, however i do notice that on higher combo cards they do seem to activate more. We're still speculating about this on the wiki.

It however does not activate due to level. I got my onida up to gold with only a combo level of 11 at first, and it plain sucked on defense. now that I've raised its combo level greatly it does far better.

That cleared up many things for me, and now I'm even more determined to create a better defense crew!

For the reference of other players who pay attention to forums, let me simplify it for you. If you have a defense crew, with all pirates having 10 or more cost, you don't have to worry about your base defense until it gets to the same cost as your "highest cost" pirate.

So if I had a crew with costs 15, 25, 41, 22, and 16, and a max DEF stat of 200, I won't have to worry about my defense weakening until 41 DEF.

For the reference of other players who pay attention to forums, let me simplify it for you. If you have a defense crew, with all pirates having 10 or more cost, you don't have to worry about your base defense until it gets to the same cost as your "highest cost" pirate.

So if I had a crew with costs 15, 25, 41, 22, and 16, and a max DEF stat of 200, I won't have to worry about my defense weakening until 41 DEF.

your def will never weaken until it is below 10 def.

The only time it will weaken before 10 def is if the max def required for your team is less than your current max def.

For example, if you have max 200 def, and run a team that costs 150 def, that team won't weaken until you hit 9/200 or lower.

But, if you have a max def of 100, and run a team that costs 150 def, that team will be weak as only 100 def worth of pirates on that team will actually defend, and the other pirate's stats will be 0.